Virtua
by Artemis Day
Summary: Psychologist Jane Foster can't imagine a stranger case than the one that's just been brought to her: an unknown man claiming to be the Norse God of Mischief, who seems to know more about her than he should. Unlocking the mysteries of his mind will throw Jane's entire world out of line, as she must question what is real, and what is just a dream.


**A/N: This story is a fill for a prompt on the magic-n-science prompt blog on tumblr. I posted a few teasers to this story on my tumblr blog. The links can be found below, but you are not required to read them (they can be seen as an unofficial prologue to this story). **

**You'll see that this is a bit darker than my usual Lokane fic. Not that Lokane isn't kind of a dark ship already, but here it will be dark in a way I haven't explored before. I hope you'll enjoy it!**

**Teaser 1: post/75118018203/medlog-automatic-transcription-services-session  
Teaser 2: post/78021721424/medlog-automatic-transcription-services-session  
Teaser 3: post/78857813465/medlog-automatic-transcription-services-session  
**

* * *

_Jane_

_Jane…_

_Jane? Hey, Jane? Wake up._

"I said, wake up!"

Jane opened her eyes and spent a moment adjusting to white blindness. In the following moments, she recognized the 'blindness' as a piece of paper stuck to her forehead. It fluttered back onto her desk with the rest of the day's inpatient forms, a tiny grease mark sat where her head had connected with it. She had decided halfway through filing, and after reading the same line ten times in a row, that a ten minute nap might be a good idea. Her last full night of sleep may have sometime last Tuesday.

Or was it last Thursday?

What day was it again?

The answer came to her before Jane could reach her phone, but she powered it on anyway. The welcome screen- a stock photo of a blade of grass with a droplet of water on the tip- glowed brilliant and showed the time to be exactly fifteen minutes to five. There had been a three in that four's place last she checked.

Her ten minute nap had been more like an hour.

"Oh _God_."

Jane brought her hands to her temples, rubbing soft circles to release the tightness. She pushed her hair out of her face. Her fingers caught on at least three knots that left her scalp burning. She had to be such a mess right now.

"Someone's working the late shift, I see."

And there was just the person she needed to confirm it. Jane flicked her eyes to her visitor. Jet black hair tied back in a ponytail showed not a single strand out of place. The precision of styling like this couldn't leave any room for errors. No why in hell Betty ever came out of a nap looking like Cousin Itt.

"I was just closing my eyes," Jane said, resisting the urge to rub the sand out of them. "I wasn't really sleeping."

"Tell that to the four messages I've left you in the past hour."

Jane peered down at her phone, switching to mail and indeed finding a red number 4 over the inbox icon. Jane clicked it off. She'd deal with the messages once she was finished with the sender.

Betty was a recent addition to Genial North psychiatric hospital, not that that meant anything. 'Recent' for them was any time below two years of residency. Genial North was a small facility. Their lack of criminally dangerous patients and the large shadow cast by the world renowned teaching hospital fifty miles away kept them firmly in obscurity. There had never been an escape attempt. No huge disaster to put it on the evening news. The majority of their inpatients were simple manic depressives or bipolar. The so-called 'worst' (Jane refused to use that word to describe them) they had was a teenage girl with supposed multiple personalities, one whose dosage of anti-depressants was due to be increased, in light of the latest incident.

It meant that taking on new staff was rare. Everyone was comfortable with mundane day by day. A few sick days, a nice Christmas bonus, and a big screen TV in the employee lounge was all they needed to keep sane among the insane. Transfers came only when another staff member retired. Such is how they got Betty, and Jane couldn't say that she minded the change or that she missed Betty's predecessor. Having another woman her age at work instead of a wheezing old man who never stopped calling her 'June' had made her life considerably easier.

"You looked pretty out of it," Betty said on their way to the cafeteria. If they hurried, they would make it on the tail end of lunchtime for salads and some mini-doughnuts. "I almost didn't want to wake you."

"I wish you hadn't," said Jane. "I dreamt I was a ballerina. I danced a perfect show and got a standing ovation."

"Sounds nice," said Betty, with all the enthusiasm Jane had come to expect from her. Betty had never been much for dream interpretation, or anything mystical and unexplained. That sort of thing never sat well for a rational thinker. Jane could relate, but dreams she'd always found to be a fascinating subject.

"You know, I used to want to be a ballerina." Jane was mostly talking to herself at this point. "Back when I was five or six, long before I knew about all the training and the work outs and what it does to your feet."

Jane shuddered, and then laughed at herself for it. Betty didn't share in the humor with her. She didn't seem to be on this planet as they took their trays to their usual table by the windows. It was there that Betty put an end to the suspense.

"I'm sorry if I seem less than chatty today," she said. It struck Jane that Betty looked more tired than Jane had ever been. "There have been some problems with one of my patients in the isolation ward."

Jane gave a sympathetic wince.

"Is it the one who keeps trying to swallow the bath soap again?"

"No, he's been very good, lately. It's this old man I just got re-assigned to. He suffers from delusions and possibly schizophrenia. They're still running tests." Betty stirred some sugar into her coffee. "He asked for a switch himself, and I'm not sure why they granted his request, but I really wish they hadn't."

"Is he violent?"

"It's not that he's violent. He's just really… forward with me."

Jane raised a questioning eyebrow.

"He thinks I'm his late wife," Betty elaborated, rolling her eyes. "Apparently, I'm a dead ringer for her when they were young. She died thirty years ago in a car accident, and he's convinced I'm her reincarnation. He keeps asking me to help him escape so that we can run away together and renew our vows. And when he's not doing that, he's asking his buddy, Father Gerard, to preside over the ceremony."

"Father Gerard?"

"Like I said: possible schizophrenia."

Betty took a long drink, and Jane was tempted to go and refill her cup for her when she was done. She looked like she could really use it.

"I wonder how he was with his old therapist," Jane said.

"You and me both," said Betty. "Remind me to bring that up to Dr. Tyler at the next staff meeting."

She wound up having an extra cup after all. She paid for it herself, against Jane's offer to pick up the tab. The lunch bell rang, calling for an end to everyone's leisure time. Patients were herded off to group therapy meetings. Personnel dipped back into the steady flow of a normal workday. It had a very high school feel to it, this setup. It had Jane occasionally wanting to 'cut class' with Betty, and spend the whole day shopping for shoes.

"So how are your patients?" Betty asked. The halls were much busier now that everyone was fed and ready for work. They had to practically yell to hear each other.

"They're good," Jane answered. "Good as they've ever been."

It was never easy for Jane to discuss her patients, even with her colleagues. The confidentiality leash only went so far in explaining that. That was the trouble with her, as her professors and former bosses liked to tell her en masse, she just got way too attached to these people. The fist-thick wad of folders she carried contained all the information for today's rounds. The top two were her favorite patients. She wasn't supposed to have favorites.

Objectively, they were also the most important. Ian Boothby and Darcy Lewis: young children just barely into their twenties, and in the eyes of some, already broken beyond repair. Jane chose to take the higher road, as she did with all the patients before them, and as she would continue to do years after Ian and Darcy walked out of here, their scars faded, if never truly gone, and their minds free. That was a day Jane Foster counted on, and no corporate puppets or insensitive board members with their thick wallets and expensive cigars were going to change that.

For now, she would contend with a doped up Darcy, playing guessing games to find out which of her 'other sides' was hanging around today, and an Ian so petrified of his own demons, that he'd spend the hour extolling Jane's many virtues in personality and therapeutic technique, mixed it with questions about Darcy. They were quite a pair, those two, always together at meals and in group therapy. He was like a lovesick puppy, Ian. He'd follow Darcy off a cliff if he had to. For her part, she was aloof to his feelings, but it was clear that she enjoyed the attention, and so every now and then, she'd grace him with a smile or a 'good work there, guy,' just to make the boy's day a little. That was them on a good day. Ian had yet to see Darcy on a bad day. There was a very good reason for that.

"We're upping Patient 061386's Depakote again," Jane said.

Betty furrowed her brow. "You mean Darcy? The one with the multiple personalities?"

"Assuming that really is what they are," Jane said, checking the script one more time to make sure the new dosage was correct. "Sometimes, I'm not so sure."

"From what you've told me, it doesn't sound like it could be something else."

"You haven't met Darcy. Her symptoms are really very inconsistent."

They pass through the swinging double doors into the general psychiatric ward, an area of pure pastel white and the occasionally watercolor floral arrangement. Doctors and personal run about in their soft shaded uniform work wear. It had become a requirement last month for all hospital staff to refrain from wearing brash colors around the patients (especially bright red). Something about not wanting to give them headaches or distress them; a new study conducted by that teaching hospital concluded this to be a legitimate concern for mental patients. How they got a result like that and what made them even think to study it, Jane would never know.

She and Betty showed ID badges to security, and were granted entry. Their first stop was the pharmacist, where Jane dropped off the script, and then to the nurse's station, where they received daily reports of last night's activity.

"How inconsistent are we talking?" Betty asked, long after Jane had thought the conversation had died out and she was busy reading a complaint against one of her bipolar patients.

"It's hard to explain," Jane said after a beat. "When she's herself, she acts very much like a normal young woman, if a bit sharp-tongued. But then she has moments where she'll say something alluding to another personality, like… one of them she calls 'Kat' who is this very over-dramatic glamorous figure. She'll start talking like her in the middle of a conversation. Her old therapist thought Kat was a reflection of some childhood dream to be an actress, or a personification of issues with her father abandoning the family for 'bigger and better things.' What's bigger and better than a Hollywood actress was his logic."

Betty hummed. "Well, I know you're not much for Freudian analysis."

"I don't hate the man's work. I just don't think much of it is feasible, you know? We're moving past that." Jane accepted the files from the nurse when it was their turn in line, and waited behind for Betty to grab hers. "Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that Darcy tends to evoke traits of her other personalities, even when she is the one in control. That, and she claims to black out when not in control and remember nothing, and yet she'll recall things that happened during the time she says she was out."

"That is suspicious," Betty conceded.

Jane nodded. "I just don't want to just call her a liar without first knowing all of the facts. I've only been working with her for four months and I think she's finally starting to trust me. Who knows? Maybe she really does have DID. What we know is she's bipolar, that's obvious. I'm trying to focus on that for now, and if I can ever make her feel comfortable talking to me and get her to take her meds regularly, then we can move forward with the rest."

Betty whistled. "I think I just lost my right to complain about patients forever."

"I'm not complaining," Jane insisted, for all the good it did to make Betty believe her. "I don't like saying it like that."

She found herself unable to meet Betty's eye. The knowing that swirled thick in their depths had her feeling twice her size, and far too happy when that one out of breath orderly, who never seemed to get the meaning of 'no running in the halls,' skidded to a halt before them.

"S-sorry to bother you, D-Dr. Foster," he panted. "I have a message from Dr. S-Selvig. He'd like to see you in Session Room 8 right away."

He came to rest next to the bulletin board, ripping apart a flier for Arts and Crafts Thursdays in the patient lounge in his quest for traction. It fluttered to the floor at Jane's feet, atop her shoes with a feather-light touch. Jane absently edged it off to the side for someone to pick up later.

"Dr. Selvig wants to see me?" She shifted her papers so they sat just a little lower to her waist. "Did he tell you what for?"

"Something about a consultation, I think?" the orderly said, his face scrunched up like it hurt for him to remember. "I just know he wants to see you whenever you have a minute free."

He took off, leaving Jane wanting for information, but not needing to ask. Setting her folders down, she fished out her schedule. The afternoon times- all lined up in a neat little column- confirmed that she had thirty minutes before her first session with Ian.

"Looks like I'll be consulting today," she said with a click of her tongue. "Here I thought I'd have another thirty minutes to myself."

"If nothing else, it's bound to be fun," said Betty with a pained expression on her face. "I have to go and see my 'husband' again. Wish me luck!"

* * *

Jane was in the elevator, watching the numbers plunge from double to single digits, when it hit her where Session Room 8 was located.

The sliver of light through the doors blinked in and out of existence until she passed the first floor. Pure darkness replaced it. Jane had to close her eyes. She'd always hated that about the basement floors. The dim light, the sterile halls, the lack of active personal because most of them were as unnerved by the place as she was. She'd never for the life of her understand how Erik could manage it, not just once, but for the last fifteen years of his life. Lacking sunlight; surrounded by the absolute worst Genial North had to offer. This was the place she had to fight tooth and nail to keep Darcy out of every other week.

The elevator dinged, and the doors slowly parted. Jane half expected to see a line of escaped patients fumbling around like zombies, too far gone to know their freedom or what to do with it. A gaunt faced nurse nodded at her from behind the welcome desk. Her partner, a little more alive with her headphones firmly on and rock music blaring from the speakers, was too busy moving to the music to pay any mind to Jane.

"Good afternoon, Dr. Foster," said an orderly wheeling a mail cart to the elevator. He was going so fast that he was out of sight before Jane could answer. She didn't take it personally.

Erik was pacing when she found him. A table covered in spreadsheets and police reports was the only piece of furniture in use. Jane couldn't even see a chair anywhere. She shook her head and went to find one, before Erik worked himself into a heart attack, the way she'd feared he would ever since his age started to show.

She found two chairs shoved into a utility closet and made careful work of removing them. One wrong move could have a mop handle cracking over her skull or a bottle of bleach turning the floors into a slip 'n' slide.

She put both chairs in place, the second one scraping against the tiles, causing Erik to jump.

"Jane!" he exclaimed, having just now realized he was no longer alone. "Good to see you."

Jane met his fatherly embrace and spent a fleeting moment enjoying the warmth of him. It was such a needed contrast to the frigidity of this place. Oftentimes, it felt like happiness was sucked away down here along with the heat.

"I can't thank you enough for taking the time to meet with me," Erik said.

"It's no big deal," she answered. "I had some free time on my hands that would've been wasted otherwise."

"Well, we can't have that, can we?" Erik pulled up a chair, and seemed very appreciative of her getting it for him.

"No sir, we can't."

Erik gathered together his papers, establishing a hasty sort of order to them with one pile bigger papers and one pile small. Jane took a quick glance at both. The smaller one provided nothing but Erik's abysmal scribbly handwriting (whoever first made that comment about doctor's handwriting had to be talking specifically about Erik). The other was a little more helpful. It was a letter addressed to Erik from the chief of police, expressing concern over the transport of a certain 'package'. Jane didn't pretend not to know what that meant.

"So, on to business," said Erik, lacing his fingers together. "Well, I won't dance around the issue. Jane, I need your help with a case."

"I figured," Jane said, with a trace of a chuckle in her voice.

"But this is a very special case," Erik went on.

He lifted the big pile onto its side, allowing a single sheet of paper at the bottom to fall off. It revealed to Jane a typed up police report with a tiny coffee stain on one top corner, and a grainy mugshot on the other. The man in it had messy black hair that partially covered his face. Defined cheekbones poked through, as did colorless eyes that seemed to follow Jane wherever she turned. Jane inched the paper closer to get a better look.

"He's proven completely resistant to all forms of treatment thus far. Some on the board of directors are starting to lose hope."

Jane nodded. She skimmed the report, it was rather lacking in details. She couldn't even find the patient's personal information.

"What are his symptoms?" she asked.

Erik turned grave. "It's hard to say. Delusions, mostly, but beyond that, it's unclear what the hell is running around in that head of his."

"What about his meds?"

Erik hesitated, and then went back to rifling through his papers.

"See for yourself," he said, and pulled out a thick, stapled packet that had Jane's jaw dropping even before she got a good look at it, and the endless line of every drug on the market. Some people complained of their patients being over-medicated, but those people had no idea.

"Jesus Christ…" Jane breathed, having flipped to the second to last page where a tiny blurb explains the patient's total lack of side effects to a powerful sleeping medication.

"You're starting to get it," Erik said with a hollow laugh. "I'd advise you not to bring up any deistic figures around him. He might take that as validation."

"Validation?" Jane set the packet down. "Validation of what?"

"His delusion," said Erik. "Our patient believes himself to be the Norse God of Mischief and Lies."

Jane opened her mouth, but really, what was there that one could say about that? They could laugh, and a layman in Jane's place likely would have. She knew better than to be so callous towards a patient, no matter how sick they were or whether or not she'd ever met them. Glancing down at the mugshot again, she made out harsh bags under the eyes and a stringy, unwashed quality to the hair that hadn't been readily apparent. His expression was surly at best, like an old man angry about all the rowdy kids getting on his lawn, but she couldn't find a single trace of anything godly about him.

Of course you don't, Jane, she said to herself. Because he's not a god, and certainly not the Norse God of Lies.

The name escaped her, but it was on the tip of her tongue. Jane was regretting now that she hadn't borrowed Erik's old mythology book more times when she was a kid.

"So he thinks he's… Loki, was it?"

"The one and only," Erik said.

He turned to the darkened window on the opposite wall, allowing Jane a quick reprieve to be proud of herself for getting it right.

"That is interesting," she said when she was done and ready to be serious. "So who is he really?"

Erik turned, looking worse now than ever before today. Jane's face fell. The answer was clear before he ever said a word.

"We don't know. That's the other part of the problem: his true identity is a complete mystery."

Jane took that in. There was no other logical way she could respond to it. This wasn't the first time they'd received a patient like this, but it that case, the man just had plain old retrograde amnesia, and it went away all on its own once his family was tracked down and came to visit. It might have been the lack of attention put into this man's file, or the fact that Erik had lost all traces of jovial charm in his voice and manner that made Jane realize it wouldn't be so simple this time.

"Let me start from the beginning," Erik said, removing his reading glasses. "About two months ago, this man was found walking on the side of Highway 61. A police cruiser spotted him and offered his a ride, but the man refused, seeing as gods don't accept favors from lowly mortals in metal chariots."

Jane stared at him. Erik coughed.

"Those ah- those were his quoted words on the scene. Anyway, the cruiser followed him for a while longer, until the driver had to answer a 911 call. Later that night, this same guy strolls into the police station and just stands there, proclaiming himself to be a visiting god and demanding that everyone kneel before him. They tried to remove him peacefully, but he stood his ground. Eventually, that had to taser him and put him in lockup for… civil disobedience, they called it. A doctor on staff declared him mentally unstable, and he was transferred here just a few days later. He's been in my care ever since."

Erik took out a handkerchief and dabbed the sweat off his brow; it was soaked in seconds. It was one of those times Jane really wished Erik would use some of that vacation time of his (he had to have accumulated three years' worth by now) and just rest for a week or so. It would never work, though. As long as patients like this one were around, good old Erik Selvig, brilliant clinical psychologist to end all brilliant clinical psychologists, would be there. Jane just had to hope that tenacity didn't cost him another twenty or thirty years.

"So you've been working with him for two months," Jane said, slipping easily into the 'summation' role Erik himself had taught her. "And in all that time, you haven't made any progress?"

Erik shook his head. "It's enough to make me want to rip all those diplomas off my wall and start working as a rodeo clown."

Jane released a snicker, try as she might to prevent it. The image of Erik in overalls and clown makeup running after bulls while half-drunk rednecks threw empty beer bottles at his feet was just too much. If Erik was bothered by her mirth, he didn't make it known.

"Now, the reason I called you down here is that I have a session with him in about five minutes, and I'd like for you to sit in and observe."

Jane blinked.

"You want me to go in there with you and your patient?"

"Well, maybe 'sit in' isn't quite what I meant," Erik amended, his eyes drifting increasing to the wall clock. "I'd like you to watch through the two way mirror. See what you can make of his behavior and mannerisms. If he feels genuine to you or if you think he's putting up false pretenses."

"You make it sound like you're prepping me to take over," Jane said, with only a degree of joking, because Erik's response threw that all down the toilet right away.

"One step at a time, Jane."

His phone buzzed in his pocket. Erik didn't bother removing it, just clicked it off through the fabric of his pants.

"It's time," he said. He took a long, dragging breath to prepare himself and walked through the back door into the therapy room. In an instant, the dark black wall became a clear window into a padded box, unfurnished barring the plain, metal table and chairs where a was being lead through another door to sit.

The man from the mugshot.

The man who thought himself a god.

He looked a lot better in person than he did in the picture.

That this was Jane's first observation surprised her, and made her thing that perhaps her mother and her friends right about her needing a date.

That being said, if this man had not been mentally ill, and was just another guy Jane met on the street, she absolutely would've been attracted to him. Hell, most women would. Even disheveled, he maintained an essence of elegance Jane rarely saw in men (or women for that matter). His stance was one of power, of a man assured of himself and his place in the world. It was almost too much, leading Jane to believe that not all of it was as legitimate as he made it look. His thin lips were set into a straight line, and he blinked several times when Erik sat down. His balding head blocked the patient from Jane's view, annoying her in ways it under no circumstances should have.

"Good morning," Erik said, his voice filtering out through the microphones and into the spinning recording device set up in the corner. "How are you feeling?"

The man looked down, as if considering his answer. When he looked back up, there was a gleam in his eye, though the rest of his face was a porcelain mask.

"Very well, thank you."

Erik wrote something down in his notebook.

"That's good," he said. "That's very good, I'm glad to hear it. I-"

"I still don't like the beds here, and I could've sworn I requested a new one ages ago."

Erik's pen hand came to a stop.

"Yes, I remember. Unfortunately, all our beds are regulation. We don't have anything that differs from what you already have."

The patient smiled. "Then why don't you bring me your bed from home. It's not as if you need it, Dr. Selvig. When is the last time you slept?"

Silence.

More silence.

Jane was stunned at the sheer nerve of the guy.

Erik just sighed.

"I wanted to begin with what we talked about last time," he said, going back to business without a hint of trouble. "About your life on… Asgard."

The patient tilted his head to one side. "Why do you hesitate so? I understand being in the presence of a god is overwhelming to say the least, but you are free to speak as you wish."

"That's very kind of you," Erik said, and for the first time, Jane could detect the exhaustion in his tone. Seemed the patient wasn't just blowing smoke, but Jane knew that already.

"It is indeed," said the patient. "I should have killed you a thousand times over by now for all the despicable slights you've made against me. If I didn't enjoy your company so much, I would have."

The young orderly at Jane's side shook his head, blowing out a hard puff of air.

"That guy is beyond creepy."

"Hey!" Jane snapped her head around. "We don't talk about patients like that."

The orderly threw his hands up in surrender, walking backwards out the open door from whence he came, and were his buddies were all poking their heads in to catch a glimpse of the mysterious patient. One look from Jane, and they scattered. Like flies, they zoomed back to their menial jobs while Jane shut and locked the door tight behind them.

It was another ten minutes before Erik was finished. Jane checked her watch to make sure. Erik was taking less time with this patient than he would a regular one. Over the course of the last twenty minutes, Jane could see why that was.

First and foremost, this man was out of his mind. It gave her only a twinge of pain to think it, but for someone so deeply set into their delusions of grandeur and power, that they would so casually threaten the life of a doctor, there was really nothing more to say.

Next was the way he treated every question Erik posed as an invitation to toy with him, to mock him, to manipulate using quick deductions of things like Erik's sleeping patterns, all in the effort to scare him off.

And that brought her to another point: this man was smart. Way too smart. Jane had readily accepted long ago that intelligence and mental stability were often mutually exclusive. Sitting before her was the greatest proof of it that had ever lived. Every word out of his mouth was eloquent and firmly spoken. He even had a British accent, just to make things better.

Erik took up his papers and pushed his chair out. Standing at the door, he reminded the patient one more time of their next session in two days.

"It's possible you'll be seeing someone other than me. Is that alright with you?"

The need to object was strong, enough that she didn't want to wait until Erik was there to object to. She should just burst into that room and lay down the law. It had completely slipped her mind, the real reason he wanted her here. This was the guy he was expected her to be able to help? After what she'd just seen, she'd be happy to never be on the same floor as him again, let alone be his doctor.

The patient was silent, an oddity so far. He seemed to be tuning Erik out, taking pleasure in letting him talk himself hoarse while not a single word reach the intended ears.

And then he looked up. He looked up right at Jane.

And he smiled.

"Why do you think I'm so happy today, Doctor?"

Jane should've walked away right there. In the coming week, she would desperately wish that she had, but right now, it was the paralyzing quality of his gaze that prevented the thought from entering her mind. He never blinked, never looked away from that one spot where she stood. It was impossible that he could know she was there. Surely, he just picked a random space to focus on and she just happened to be standing on it. That was the only logical explanation. He displayed textbook narcissism and loved the look of himself, to the extent of his stare being hungry.

Erik exited the session room, no worse for the wear, if a little more rumpled than when he went in. He shifted the papers aside for future filing, and entered a few final observations into his notebook before sticking it into his jacket pocket out of sight.

"So, what do you make of him?"

Jane glanced away, and felt somehow lighter as she did.

"Well… he needs help. That's for sure."

Erik nodded. "That pretty much sums up all my progress with him in the last two months."

"Oh, I don't believe that."

It was good for her to go into 'pep talk' mode and have an excuse to get away from that mirror. The chill up her spine could be dealt with later, or not at all. She could sit with Erik and discuss the case; let herself fall into the comfortable world of her chosen profession and trade ideas with her mentor for hours. It would be good brain exercise. Other than Betty, she had no other close friends at work.

The tingling sensation on the back of her neck was all that kept her from relaxing. Every now and then, she'd catch herself turning to that window again. The lights long ago were doused, and the patient returned to his room. Nothing remained but a square of black, and a lingering cold that for once, couldn't be explained by the thermostat.

"Say, Erik," she said, after a short period of time had passed. "That _is_ two way glass over there, right?"

"Of course," Erik said through the pen clamped between his teeth. "All the session rooms down here have them."

Jane cautioned a final turn of her head. She viewed the wide and all-consuming darkness, behind which there could be nothing. Because all the ghosts and ghouls her inner mind created were only make believe, just like magic and just like gods.

"Okay, just checking," she said, and she went back to her work with nothing to fear.

* * *

Jane's apartment was a disaster. She was a grown up and she could admit it. She could also admit that there was little her disorganized and workaholic self could do about it.

When she walked through the front door, she could see almost the entire layout of the place. She entered the living room, with books and papers stacked sky high on the coffee table, fed into the small kitchen area and a sink full of dirty dishes she had yet to tackle. There was no dining room, but a long strip of hallway that led to her bedroom, the bathroom, and a linen closet that she hadn't been able to open in months. Her coat rack, normally the neatest part of the whole setup, was covered in a bulging pile of old coats and sweaters that had to be cleaned and pressed before the hospital clothing drive next month. With it out of commission, her everyday coat became a crumpled heap stuffed into the corner.

Four boxes of old files sat in pairs at the sides of her secondhand couch. She'd been meaning to sort through those for almost a year now. Maybe she'd start tomorrow. Her TV was turned on to some nameless period drama. It had been an action movie when she turned it on this morning. She switched to the weather channel, and then shut it off once the radio's forecast of heavy rain was confirmed. She'd never been much of a television person. She watched a favorite movie once in a while, and the rest of the time, the TV's primary function was to dissuade potential burglars from invading an 'occupied' apartment while she was away.

It was a shoddy setup, but it worked for Jane. As long as she had space to move and knew where everything was, there was never a problem. She certainly didn't have to worry about making a good impression for guests. The only people who ever came to visit were delivery people, or close friends who had known her long enough to be used to it.

Pushing aside today's newspaper and a half eaten power bar from breakfast, Jane sank onto her couch with a brand new manila folder in hand. In it was everything currently known about their John Doe. The paper stack was a fraction of an inch thick, a far cry from the paperback books that were many of her other patient files. That they didn't have a real name for him yet didn't sit well with Jane. She refused to think of the man as 'Loki.' That would just leave her receptive to his mind games when she met him in two days. Not that 'John' was any better. John was her father, not a mysterious quasi-European stranger with identity issues.

She would just have to stick with 'the patient.' A mouthful it may be, it was the safest option. It kept her objective, reminded her that this was Erik's case, nor hers. She would not get attached. She was just there to help. Whether she could or not depended on just how good a clinical psychologist she really was.

She doubled and triple checked Erik's (thankfully typed) notes.

The patient had officially been in their custody for one month and twenty three days.

The patient was complacent from the start and had no record of violent outbursts or harassment.

The patient was cooperative and polite to staff members, even when refusing food or trying to stay up past bedtime.

The patient had sessions with Erik twice a week, schedule permitting. At one point, a prior engagement of his led to another doctor taking Erik's place. Said doctor reported no unusual activity with the patient, but made it clear that he would not agree to fill in for Erik again.

The patient had little to say about his background, claiming that they could read all about it in mythology books. However, he went on to state that most accounts of 'his' exploits in the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda were either falsified or exaggerated, as were those of Thor, the Norse God of Thunder.

Related to the above, the patient displays clear contempt for the Thor character, for reasons he will not divulge.

He is similarly derisive of the Odin character, but seems to soften at the mention of Odin's supposed consort, Frigga. Again, he will not give a reason.

Upon being questioned of Sigyn, the mythological Loki's wife, the patient claims she is fictitious, and that his true love was already married to the Thor character.

Jane reread the last line, trying to call up the name of Thor's wife in the mythology. She believed it was Sif, but if she remembered correctly, Loki in the myths never showed much affection for her. One time, he chopped all her hair off while she was sleeping just because he thought it was funny. What kind of love was that?

_'The kind only a crazy person could come up with,'_ said the side of her that remained a know-it-all college student.

Jane lifted off the couch. Scratching an itch on her scalp, she made her way to the bedroom. The bed still hadn't been made, but a little straightening of the sheets and a fluff of the pillows and she'd be fine for bedtime.

Her closet door was wide open. With so many boxes jutting out, it was impossible for it to be anything but. Most of it was childhood toys and games she'd been too sentimental to throw away. Even now, the thought of tossing it all on the curb or giving it away to charity was like a weight in her stomach. Some mature adult she'd turned out to be.

At the very bottom was a purple striped shoe box. Inside were the pages she'd ripped from Erik's mythology book when she was eight. On one of her family's many visits to his house, she'd been so eager to finish the story she was reading, that when her mother told her it was time for them to head home and let uncle Erik get some sleep, she'd torn the pages right out of the binding and carried them home in her pocket. To this day, she hadn't told Erik it was her.

Sitting cross legged on the floor, Jane perused the browned pages. The words in ancient style lettering transported her to a mead hall, where Thor and Loki donned the appearances of a bride and a bridesmaid to steal mjolnir back from King Thyrm. She laughed whenever Thor almost blew his cover, and Loki had to smooth things over before they could get caught. She could imagine Loki- whom she used to picture as kind of a goofy looking figure with a big, hairy nose and too many teeth- getting increasingly aggravated with the tactless thunder god, coming closer and closer to throwing his hands up and leaving him to screw himself over with his total lack of table manners.

It was a good story, she thought, even if the ending was a bit brutal. She might not have killed everyone in the room if it had been her, but that was why she was a tiny, pacifistic doctor and not a burly, volatile god who controlled the weather.

She went to return the papers to the box. This had been more than enough of a break for her. She had a lot of studying to do if she was going to be ready to meet her (no- _Erik's_) patient. Pulling the box out all the way, a few more items from her past were revealed, things she had never sought out before, and therefore never knew she still had. There was the rubber band ball she used to play catch with, and here was the school photo of her first crush that she'd kept in the back of her science notebook for all of fourth and fifth grade.

Further in was a folded piece of construction paper, inside of which appeared to be another, smaller, paper. How something that thick could be so compact, she didn't know. A slight waxy scent wafted from it, explained away when Jane unfolded an extensive (and painfully juvenile) crayon drawing of two stick figures. One had a pointy yellow crown on his head and a single red line trailing out from his neck like a cape. The other had a shock of brown slashed over the head to form long hair. She wore a pink blob of a dress and had a big, wide smile on her face as she and the other stick figure embraced. Little shapes resembling hearts floated all around them, at least fifty of them.

Taped at the bottom was a lined piece of paper, covered in childish writing that had Jane grinning in spite of herself.

"I remember this," she thought aloud.

Jane settled back with her head resting on the side of the mattress. Maybe another five minutes of break time wouldn't hurt.

_'Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl who lived in a tiny village,_' she read. _'She had lots of good friends, but what she really wanted was a handsome prince. One day, a handsome prince came to the town, and he met the beautiful girl and they fell in love at first sight. The prince wanted to marry the girl, but then an evil wizard came and took her away! So the prince traveled to the evil wizard's house and beat him up with his sword. And so the prince freed the beautiful girl and they got married. And they all lived happily ever after. The End.'_

She'd gotten a B plus and a smiley face sticker. In retrospect, it was a good thing 'writer' had never been on Jane's list of dream jobs, but for a six year old raised on a diet of myths and fairy tales, it was about all one could expect, and it was cute in its own way. She'd been an imaginative little girl once upon a time.

But the time for fantasy was over, and she had a firm reality to face in the coming days: a windowless basement room, where resided a man who believed that reality _was_ fantasy. Jane returned everything to its proper place and pushed the shoebox back into the depths of her closet. She made a stop at the kitchen for some coffee and a bunch of grapes for a midnight snack. Tonight, she would need an hour or five of researching, an hour after that of planning, and a good night's sleep with whatever time she had left after that.

She was bringing her A-game for this one.


End file.
